Anthony Trollope - Autobiography of Anthony Trollope

how it had come to pass that the English novels of the present

day have become what they are, to point out the effects which they

have produced, and to inquire whether their great popularity has on

the whole done good or evil to the people who read them. I still

think that the book is one well worthy to be written.

I intended to write that book to vindicate my own profession as

a novelist, and also to vindicate that public taste in literature

which has created and nourished the profession which I follow.

And I was stirred up to make such an attempt by a conviction that

there still exists among us Englishmen a prejudice in respect

to novels which might, perhaps, be lessened by such a work. This

prejudice is not against the reading of novels, as is proved by their

general acceptance among us. But it exists strongly in reference

to the appreciation in which they are professed to be held; and it

robs them of much of that high character which they may claim to

have earned by their grace, their honesty, and good teaching.

No man can work long at any trade without being brought to consider

much, whether that which he is daily doing tends to evil or to

good. I have written many novels, and have known many writers of

novels, and I can assert that such thoughts have been strong with

them and with myself. But in acknowledging that these writers have

received from the public a full measure of credit for such genius,

ingenuity, or perseverance as each may have displayed, I feel that

there is still wanting to them a just appreciation of the excellence

of their calling, and a general understanding of the high nature

of the work which they perform.

By the common consent of all mankind who have read, poetry takes

the highest place in literature. That nobility of expression, and

all but divine grace of words, which she is bound to attain before

she can make her footing good, is not compatible with prose. Indeed

it is that which turns prose into poetry. When that has been in

truth achieved, the reader knows that the writer has soared above

the earth, and can teach his lessons somewhat as a god might teach.

He who sits down to write his tale in prose makes no such attempt,

nor does he dream that the poet's honour is within his reach;--but

his teaching is of the same nature, and his lessons all tend to

the same end. By either, false sentiments may be fostered; false

notions of humanity may be engendered; false honour, false love,

false worship may be created; by either, vice instead of virtue

may be taught. But by each, equally, may true honour, true love;

true worship, and true humanity be inculcated; and that will be

the greatest teacher who will spread such truth the widest. But

at present, much as novels, as novels, are bought and read, there

exists still an idea, a feeling which is very prevalent, that novels

at their best are but innocent. Young men and women,--and old men

and women too,--read more of them than of poetry, because such reading

is easier than the reading of poetry; but they read them,--as men

eat pastry after dinner,--not without some inward conviction that

the taste is vain if not vicious. I take upon myself to say that

it is neither vicious nor vain.

But all writers of fiction who have desired to think well of their

own work, will probably have had doubts on their minds before they

have arrived at this conclusion. Thinking much of my own daily

labour and of its nature, I felt myself at first to be much afflicted

and then to be deeply grieved by the opinion expressed by wise and

thinking men as to the work done by novelists. But when, by degrees,

I dared to examine and sift the sayings of such men, I found them

to be sometimes silly and often arrogant. I began to inquire what

had been the nature of English novels since they first became common

in our own language, and to be desirous of ascertaining whether they

had done harm or good. I could well remember that, in my own young

days, they had not taken that undisputed possession of drawing-rooms

which they now hold. Fifty years ago, when George IV. was king, they

were not indeed treated as Lydia had been forced to treat them in

the preceding reign, when, on the approach of elders, Peregrine

Pickle was hidden beneath the bolster, and Lord Ainsworth put away

under the sofa. But the families in which an unrestricted permission

was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many

they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct

morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men

and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could

not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo was

laid upon novel-reading as a pursuit, which was to the novelist

a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I

now complain.

There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that

people of an age to read have got too much power into their own

hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right

and left, above stairs and below, in town houses and in country

parsonages, by young countesses and by farmers' daughters, by old

lawyers and by young students. It has not only come to pass that

a special provision of them has to be made for the godly, but that

the provision so made must now include books which a few years since

the godly would have thought to be profane. It was this necessity

which, a few years since, induced the editor of Good Words to apply

to me for a novel,--which, indeed, when supplied was rejected, but

which now, probably, owing to further change in the same direction,

would have been accepted.

If such be the case--if the extension of novel-reading be so wide

as I have described it--then very much good or harm must be done

by novels. The amusement of the time can hardly be the only result

of any book that is read, and certainly not so with a novel, which

appeals especially to the imagination, and solicits the sympathy of

the young. A vast proportion of the teaching of the day,--greater

probably than many of us have acknowledged to ourselves,--comes

from these books, which are in the hands of all readers. It is from

them that girls learn what is expected from them, and what they

are to expect when lovers come; and also from them that young men

unconsciously learn what are, or should be, or may be, the charms

of love,--though I fancy that few young men will think so little

of their natural instincts and powers as to believe that I am right

in saying so. Many other lessons also are taught. In these times,

when the desire to be honest is pressed so hard, is so violently

assaulted by the ambition to be great; in which riches are the

easiest road to greatness; when the temptations to which men are

subjected dull their eyes to the perfected iniquities of others;

when it is so hard for a man to decide vigorously that the pitch,

which so many are handling, will defile him if it be touched;--men's

conduct will be actuated much by that which is from day to day

depicted to them as leading to glorious or inglorious results. The

woman who is described as having obtained all that the world holds

to be precious, by lavishing her charms and her caresses unworthily

and heartlessly, will induce other women to do the same with

theirs,--as will she who is made interesting by exhibitions of

bold passion teach others to be spuriously passionate. The young

man who in a novel becomes a hero, perhaps a Member of Parliament,

and almost a Prime Minister, by trickery, falsehood, and flash

cleverness, will have many followers, whose attempts to rise in

the world ought to lie heavily on the conscience of the novelists

who create fictitious Cagliostros. There are Jack Sheppards other

than those who break into houses and out of prisons,--Macheaths,

who deserve the gallows more than Gay's hero.

Thinking of all this, as a novelist surely must do,--as I certainly

have done through my whole career,--it becomes to him a matter of

deep conscience how he shall handle those characters by whose words

and doings he hopes to interest his readers. It will very frequently

be the case that he will be tempted to sacrifice something for

effect, to say a word or two here, or to draw a picture there,

for which he feels that he has the power, and which when spoken or

drawn would be alluring. The regions of absolute vice are foul and

odious. The savour of them, till custom has hardened the palate and

the nose, is disgusting. In these he will hardly tread. But there

are outskirts on these regions, on which sweet-smelling flowers

seem to grow; and grass to be green. It is in these border-lands

that the danger lies. The novelist may not be dull. If he commit

that fault he can do neither harm nor good. He must please, and the

flowers and the grass in these neutral territories sometimes seem

to give him so easy an opportunity of pleasing!

The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And

he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How shall he teach

lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to

his readers? That sermons are not in themselves often thought to

be agreeable we all know. Nor are disquisitions on moral philosophy

supposed to be pleasant reading for our idle hours. But the novelist,

if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same

purpose as the clergyman, and must have his own system of ethics.

If he can do this efficiently, if he can make virtue alluring and

vice ugly, while he charms his readers instead of wearying them,

then I think Mr. Carlyle need not call him distressed, nor talk

of that long ear of fiction, nor question whether he be or not the

most foolish of existing mortals.

I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists

may boast as a class that has been the general result of our own

work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty

that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss

Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such

to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George

Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words,

with that absence of self-personality which the dead may claim, I

will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any

one by search through the works of the six great English novelists

I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach

a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? When men in their

pages have been described as dishonest and women as immodest, have

they not ever been punished? It is not for the novelist to say,

baldly and simply: "Because you lied here, or were heartless there,

because you Lydia Bennet forgot the lessons of your honest home,

or you Earl Leicester were false through your ambition, or you

Beatrix loved too well the glitter of the world, therefore you shall

be scourged with scourges either in this world or in the next;" but